Maps and Keys
by Kshar
Summary: He's being careful with these memories.


Maps and Keys

by Kshar

Disclaimer: Characters are the property of CBS. Used without permission, not for profit.

xx

"You're still in pain."

"I'm okay," she says, and settles herself, hesitantly, on his couch. She catches his eye and smiles, but it's a small, pale imitation, and he worries.

"I can hear your heartbeat. I can tell."

"You can hear it?"

He thinks he's told her this before, but she must have forgotten. Memories, human or vampire, are fleeting. He thinks, though, that he remembers every word she's ever said to him, every glimpse he's had of her face by moon or daylight. He's being careful with these memories. He's saving these things away.

He watches her anxiously for another moment, and then goes to make her coffee, for something to do. "Yeah, I can hear it," he agrees, with his back to her. "Or feel it," he says, quieter, so maybe--probably--she doesn't hear him.

xx

She'd called him before dark, and he'd still been unconscious, but he checked his phone as soon as he woke, because he'd had this _feeling_. Her voice on tape was quieter than normal; shaky.

He'd felt his blood heat up almost immediately, and when he called her back he almost snapped at her to stay where she was, and peeled out of his parking lot, tension in the bones of his feet. The hospital, when he gets there, is all flickering green light and a million sad scents.

Beth is curled slightly sideways on a hospital bed, and when she sees him she leans forward, which he can see she immediately regrets. She hisses in a breath between her teeth; her upper lip curls.

The pain in his chest gets better for a moment, and then worse again when he sees bruises starting to darken on her neck and arm. He leans down to hug her and is as gentle as he can be, but she still flinches.

xx

L.A. drivers, unaccustomed to the rain, either slow to a crawl or speed up and take stupid risks. Which ends in crashes, which end in gridlock. What should be a twenty-minute journey lasts an hour, and Beth rests her head on the passenger-side window, her face ghost-colored.

xx

In Mick's apartment, Beth is silent, fingers playing with the braided fringe on the blanket. She wonders why he owns a blanket in the same instant she realizes: for her.

It's both flattering and kind of unnerving to be so important to him, and she's never quite sure if she'll grow into it someday or if it'll always be a little odd and a little wrong that's she's his world.

He's hers, too, of course, but that's different.

It had never been like this with Josh. She and Josh had loved each other with a casual, friendly efficiency. She'd liked the way he worked at puzzles, from people to the law to cooking; one day, she had been sure, Josh would have the whole world figured out and typed onto notecards or put into a bullet-point presentation. And if not, at least it wouldn't be for lack of trying.

It was the trying that broke her heart slowly and painfully when she remembered him--the line on his brow as he talked through a case with her; his eyes narrowed at his laptop screen. It had all been such a waste, and now she's grieving one love as she welcomes another, and sometimes it feels wrong. At dawn, when Mick walks away from her on the balcony and she watches the sunrise alone, a hand to her eyes, it feels wrong. When he leaves her at night to go home to his iced cell, or when she traces the circular scars on her wrist with a fingernail, it feels wrong, but she can't come up with an acceptable alternative.

"How's the head?" the ER doctor had asked her, wincing in sympathy, and Beth would have laughed if that prospect wasn't painful, because the first answer that came to mind was: "All over the place."

xx

Mick's busying himself, now, around his apartment, picking up papers and putting them down again, making notes that can't be more than hieroglyphics. He's watching her too closely out of the corner of his eye to concentrate hard on what he's doing, but she knows better than to draw attention to the fact, so she concentrates on breathing, which is, today, much harder than it's ever been before. She tries shorter breaths, which hurt, and deeper breaths, which hurt, and shallower breaths, which also hurt. In between the scratching sounds of his pen on paper and the tap of his fingers against the keyboard, she can hear rain spattering against the windows.

Her natural urge to question, to always keep the conversation going, she puts aside.

xx

There's a smudge of dried blood at the corner of her lip. He isn't hungry, so instead he's angry. He can't think about it directly, or he will walk outside his door and tear the throat out of the first person he sees.

She's so very quiet. He wonders if she's still in shock.

She'd used his cellphone on the drive home (to _his_ home, he corrects himself mentally. This part-office, part-apartment, part-freezer isn't her home, and it shouldn't be. She deserves something else). She'd put her hand in his hip pocket while he drove--he'd frozen for a moment--and taken his phone without asking. It struck him as such an old-married-couple thing to do, and he wondered if she'd thought before she did it.

She'd called her credit card companies.

"I could do that for you," he'd suggested.

"They're my cards, and you're driving," she'd said, and closed her eyes for a moment, phone to her ear, the sound of muzak echoing tinnily.

He watched her, instead of the road, for a long few minutes. At the next red light, he reached across and brushed her hair back out of her face. She pressed 'hold' on the phone, and turned a little in her seat, toward him.

"Mick. I don't--"

"I know," he said, and then the light turned green. He reluctantly moved his hand back to the steering wheel. "Visa's waiting," he reminded her.

xx

"This means I'm on the right track." She has one hand wrapped around the coffee cup, and one free for expression. He's always loved the way she talks with her hands.

"Beth," he says, his voice a growl of frustration. "You said you didn't even get a good look at the guy."

"It was dark in there. The power was out," she says, and then touches her jaw, gingerly, with two fingers. The skin there is rapidly turning gray-purple. "I could probably give a pretty good description of his boots."

Mick, at his computer, clenches his hands into fists beneath the table's surface so she won't see. He refrains from commenting on the fact that she went into an abandoned apartment building--suspected address of the drug-dealer she's been investigating--alone. As though her shiny I.D. and moral fortitude will protect her. Mick is old enough to know better.

Beth, being Beth, had fought tooth and nail and claw, but still wound up minus her purse, cellphone and a considerable number of braincells. He doesn't know whether this should be comforting him or not. Sometimes he thinks she should learn when to lie down and play dead, or when to wait in the car.

"Maybe you need a new job," he says, but doesn't bother putting much spirit into it, because he already knows how she's likely to respond.

She doesn't say a word. She doesn't need to. The look she gives him is enough.

xx

He doesn't need to wake her up periodically, as the doctor had told him. Beth has been an intermittentinsomniac since the age of four, and she spends most of her night picking up one of his books at random, reading a few pages and then putting it down and picking up another. After she's negotiated her way ruefully to his bookcase for the third time, he gathers up a stack of books at random and puts them beside the couch for her. He teases her about the MTV generation and her attention span, but he can see her head still hurts. He remembers, vaguely, what it felt like to be human and in the kind of pain that doesn't just go away.

"You can tell a lot about someone from their bookshelves," she says to him at one point.

"In my case, you can probably learn more from what's behind them," he tells her.

She wrinkles her nose, confused. He remembers he hasn't shown her the false walls behind the books, and reminds himself to do so when she's better. She should know his secret places.

She dozes, in spells, her small hands folded over the top of the blanket. Mick keeps working on his paperwork, and watching her. The pain in his chest goes away, finally. He can hear her breathe; hear her heartbeat, slow and regular; see her finger twitch just slightly in her sleep as though there was something else she wanted to say.

xx

End.

xx

Feedback of any kind would be gratefully received. Thanks for reading.

Kshar

April 2009


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